It may be questioned whether that particular member of the Mortomley family, who made ducks and drakes of the Dassell ancestral acres, felt anything like the grief at losing his patrimony which Archibald Mortomley endured when he stepped across the threshold of Homewood with the conviction strong upon him that he should return there no more. Everything in this world is comparative. To lords temporal and spiritual, and to honourable gentlemen of the House of Commons, and to millionaires east of Temple Bar, that clinging of the Irish peasant to his mud cabin and couple of acres of bog, would seem a most ridiculous piece of foolery were it not for the bullets with which Patrick contrives to make such a tragedy out of his comical surroundings. Nevertheless, eviction means as much misery to the shiftless Hibernian as his cup is well capable of holding. This is a fact, I think, we are all rather too apt to lose sight of when considering the extent of our neighbour's misfortunes. Because the house is not grand, or the furniture nice, or the wife beautiful, or the children winning to our imaginations, we are apt to think the man's loss has been light to him. Whereas his modest home set about with gods of his own making and creating, may have been more desirable in his eyes than Chatsworth itself, and he may mourn over his dead with a grief less palpable, it is true, because the work-a-day world is intolerant of grief among the poor and lowly, but as real as that our Sovereign Lady feels for her husband, or as that wherein the sweet singer of Israel indulged when the messenger came swiftly and told him though not in words, "Absalom is slain." To a business man especially the world is in this respect hard and unsympathetic. Because we do not understand his trade, and should not care for it if we did, we fancy he has regarded his mills, his works, his factory as we look upon such erections. And yet the place where he has made his money, or lost it, has been most part of his world to him; as much his world as camps to the soldier, courts to the diplomatist, ball-rooms to the beauty, Africa to Livingstone. A man cannot continue year after year to exercise any calling, if it be even the culture of watercresses, and not centre a large portion of his interest in it, and to a man like Mortomley it was a simple impossibility for his laboratory, his home, his works, his men, his colours to become matters of indifference to him. There had been a time when it would have well-nigh broken his heart to leave Homewood and all its associations behind, but there were bitter memories now superadded to the sweet recollections of the olden time, memories which, throughout all the future, he should never be able to recall save with a galling sense of pain. The old Homewood was dead to him, and in its place there was a new Homewood, the thought of which could never cross his mind save with a sense of shame and degradation.